Facebook breaks up with Breakup Notifier after 3.6 million (!) users
Will Brinson
Last week, we mentioned Breakup Notifier, a Facebook-related service that allowed users to register and then receive updates when someone they’re obsessed with attracted to ended whatever relationship they’re in.
That service has been shut down by Facebook. Because they got 3.6 million users in the span of about seven days.
In the grand scheme of things, that’s actually a fairly small percentage of people who use Facebook. However, it’s an incredibly large amount of folks that would like to immediately know — via email or however — when someone becomes single, even if by doing so they violate their privacy.
Speaking of violation of privacy, Facebook didn’t cite that when they shut down the service. Instead, they let developer Dan Loewenherz know, via TechCrunch, that they were crushing his hopes and dreams because of an API call.
“To ensure positive user experiences on Platform, we run routine automated screens that take user feedback, machine learning and various algorithms into account and remove spammy applications. For example, if an application is making an inordinate number of stream.publish calls and receiving a large number of user reports, it may be removed by our automated systems to protect the user experience and the Platform ecosystem.”
Of course, API calls don’t exactly justify the need to remove Dan’s personal Facebook account.
If you check out Dan’s Twitter feed — or the Breakup Notifier Twitter feed — you’ll notice that they’d love to get things up and running again, but haven’t had much success as of yet, due to Facebook stonewalling them.
Perhaps he should try stalking?
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